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Fiona
Dalk was looking at the Valentine’s Day card I made him like it was a fucking kitten or something. A kitten he didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with but that he wanted to keep anyways. Seriously, he was petting the thing.
And... I kind of liked it. He was normally such a stoic, serious, grump of an alien. When those little moments of quiet sensitivity shone through, they almost always left me stunned. It was the same way I’d felt seeing him carve the vakta on Halloween. The way his strong warrior’s hands had put themselves to use at something that required such nuanced, artistic skill. And he’d carved a flower, of all things.
Like the ones in my tattoos.
I probably shouldn’t have made his card special by adding the flower to it. I didn’t want it to give him, or anyone, the wrong idea. To make it seem like I was some weird stalker trying to send him a message in secret code. Especially after I was dumb enough to kiss him at the New Year’s Eve party.
I still can’t believe I did that.
It had been a spontaneous action, completely born out of the moment. It didn’t mean anything. I would have kissed any bloke beside me.
Wouldn’t I have?
I eyed Oxriel, Zoren, and the others, and wondered, had I been standing beside any of them instead of Dalk that night, would it have been one of them I would have hurled myself at?
Somehow I couldn’t quite convince myself I would have.
I’d probably freaked Dalk right the fuck out, too. I just threw myself at him like some drunken dumbass. Only I hadn’t been drunk.
He’d never mentioned it again.
Until now, I supposed.
If you have any other traditions... Any that require a male... I suppose I would not mind obliging you...
God. Poor guy. He’d said it as if he was grudgingly willing to help me pull out a broken tooth or something. Like, if it was absolutely necessary and nobody else was around, then he’d hold his nose and do it. He probably thought human traditions like kissing someone at midnight on January first were colossally culturally important or something.
Maybe that was why he was so fixated on being careful with his card. Because he didn’t want to offend me and my weird human sensibilities.
At least I didn’t think I had offended him by giving it to him. He had thanked me for it, after all.
I am thinking about this way too much.
“Well, since we’re all up, should we go get some food? We can deliver some of the other cards,” Tilly said.
“Yes,” I said, seizing on that idea like it was some kind of escape route out of the sudden messy awkwardness of my own thoughts. Not that my thoughts wouldn’t follow me, of course. But at least Dalk wouldn’t be standing right beside me while I picked them all apart.
Only, after we went back into our cave to retrieve the rest of the cards and came back out, there he was waiting with the other Sea Sand lads. As we all started walking through Gahn Errok’s mountain to the main hall, he fell into quietly surly step beside me.
“You don’t have to keep it, you know,” I said suddenly. “The card.” I noticed that he didn’t have it with him anymore.
“Oh,” he said, a gruff grunt of a sound. “Why? Am I supposed to do something else with it? I have never received a human card before.”
“No, no. Keeping it is fine. I’m just saying you don’t have to. In fact, if you’ve already gotten rid of it, that’s totally fine!”
“I have not gotten rid of it,” he said quietly. We’d fallen a little behind the rest of the group, walking side-by-side through shimmering, sapphire-walled halls. “I have put it in a safe, dry place in the sleeping cave. Somewhere high up where it will not get ruined by a clumsy warrior’s claws. Or damaged by water.” A disdainful sneer entered his voice. “There is far too much water here.”
“What are you, a cat?” I said with a laugh. “I’ll never understand why you Sea Sand guys hate the water so much. It doesn’t seem to bother the Deep Sky men at all.”
“The Deep Sky men do not even have half a brain to share out among them,” Dalk hissed. “They’d probably thank the very sky for pissing on them.”
Now my laugh was louder, drawing looks from Nasrin and some of the other males up ahead.
“Hey!” I said, still chuckling, and losing some of my awkwardness from before. “I like the water too. Does that mean I don’t even have half a brain?”
“That is...” Dalk sighed tensely, then ran rough claws through his long black hair. “That is different.”
